


And we are remade

by biggrstaffbunch



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, but only in the obvious ways, mild spoilers for Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-26
Updated: 2014-03-26
Packaged: 2018-01-17 01:30:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1368967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biggrstaffbunch/pseuds/biggrstaffbunch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve's got a list. Bucky's got a past. They figure it all out, together.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>  <i>His finger taps a line in the book, lips tipping into a half-smile. "Plus. For all that there’s an awful lot left to experience, there are a few things I never got around to trying even in the forties, you know?"</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	And we are remade

In the aftermath of everything, there’s only Steve and Bucky.

Bucky, half-sprawled across Steve’s overstuffed couch, wears a pair of borrowed sweatpants and an old Iron Man t-shirt that Steve bought six months ago off a street vendor near Port Authority. His hair has been cut short again and he’s freshly showered, looking so perfectly at home as his mouth closes over a yawn that Steve could almost pretend he was never gone in the first place.

Then Bucky shifts, and there’s the metal arm. The pallor of Bucky’s skin. The lost look in Bucky’s eyes.

And in the face of these little souvenirs, how could Steve think of anything but Bucky’s time away? The Winter Soldier lingers in the unseen spaces of what Bucky’s become, a ghost that won’t fade. That can’t be exorcised.

But, then... Bucky’s lingered, too. His laugh, his faith, the curl of his hair, the stride of his walk. Every countless secret he ever whispered but only when the rain came to drown out the sound of his voice. Steve’s collected and kept these memories the way he can't collect bruises, though sometimes they hurt like a bruise all the same: tender to the core. 

He passes a hand over his heart, breathes around the sudden clenching there. Wonders if pain has made its home in Bucky, too, crawling through his organs, taking root and refusing to let go.

Steve searches for words, and tries not to think about cauterized wounds, the thousand ways a person could bleed out without giving anyone on the outside a clue.

“Hungry?” is what he finally asks, and winces; there’s only a bottle of mustard and a loaf of bread in Steve’s fridge, and it’s not like he can cook worth a damn, anyway.

Bucky arches an eyebrow like he knows, the barest hint of a smile on his face. “Nah,” he says. “If I wanted to die, I’ve got a million other roads to take besides your shit-poor spaghetti carbonara.”

Steve bites his lip against a retort. Wants to tell him not to joke, not about this. Not about death. Not yet. Probably not ever again.

Instead, he nudges Bucky’s legs with his knee. “My carbonara ain’t as bad as your scrambled eggs,” he says, and though the rhythm is stilted, the words feel right. Gives him the courage to say:

“Move,” a gentle command, as he nudges Bucky’s leg again. Bucky makes a show of sighing before slouching over to make room next to him.

They’re too wide for the couch by at least half a person, but there’s a reason Bucky used to call Steve a stubborn sonofabitch. He owns up to the name now, wedging in and wriggling until they’re sitting side by side, shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, knee to knee.

"Pushy as always, Rogers," Bucky says, but he tilts into Steve like a flower sways to the sun. It's the first time Bucky's leaned on Steve since some dingy pub in Europe so many lifetimes ago. Steve squeezes the nape of Bucky's neck, fleeting and shy, seeking answers in the heat of skin over muscle.

This is the equivalent of a wolf baring it's throat, Steve knows. Trust, above anything else, and it is so unconscious as to be instinctive. Steve is touched, but he is also unsure.

Illuminated by only the dim circled glow of an overhead lamp, Bucky’s features are hidden, the vivid blue of his eyes barely visible. He looks like a stranger, and it makes Steve ache, low down in his belly.

He used to draw Bucky. Over and over. Kept a sketch on his bedside table, tucked up against the lamp. It was rendered in soft sweeps, blurred angles, smudged curves. A smile carved from light. A hand emerging from the shadows that shrouded it. A face that was only half-formed, negative space lingering like a sentence unfinished, unsaid. Sometimes when there was a baseball game on television or a dark-haired man walked with a particular sort of swagger down the street, Steve got this slow-cello tug of yearning in his chest. Unbidden, it would build, grow bright like the star of his uniform, bursting into something hot and volatile, crawling up his throat and sitting there, violence restrained.

Taming that wild grief has been a way of life for so long. Steve supposes he and Bucky are both getting used to something new.

"There's this book," Steve says abruptly, picks up a little notebook from the coffee table. “Been trying to make a list of things I need to know from the last seventy years.” He glances at Bucky from under his lashes, hesitant. “There’s a lot of stuff, but. I figure it’s as good a place to start as any.”

Maybe all they need is a way to make the path a little clearer, a little easier. Once, Bucky was a lighthouse in the storm, beaming Steve home in a sea of bloodied noses and Vicks Vapor Rub and hopes dashed over and over again.

The least Steve can do in return is give Bucky a star to navigate by. 

That’s how they find themselves with their heads bent together, skimming over words scrawled in the book that Steve’s spent the past year filling with wish-lists and must-reads, epic movies and world events, foods and drinks and technology, seven decades condensed into neat columns of his loopy handwriting. It’s something innocent, after a long period of living in an underbelly inhabited by spies and assassins and SHIELD agents. Dossiers and missions and a fist moving through the dark.

And the dirty secret is, no one’s hands are clean in this whole mess. There’s a bewildered hunger that lurks in Steve’s chest, a shameful desire for absolution. For benediction. For Bucky to just _look_ him. Because Steve remembers a speeding train and a winter day and the wild fear that ripped through him as Bucky fell. Always reaching. Always falling.

Steve wants to be forgiven. But he’s not even sure that the Bucky who _could_ forgive him is still there, buried underneath this haunted, hunted man.

And yet. And yet.

Every time their fingers bump as they both move to turn a page, Steve sees the scar that bisects the knuckle between Bucky’s pinkie and his ring finger, and he remembers the punch that got him that split skin, the one that Bucky threw the very first time he defended Steve in a back-alley brawl. He sees that scar and remembers ointment and clumsy stitches and the first flare of helpless, hopeless love. The same love he feels now, no less demanding, no more gentle, with age. Still a tide that rips the ocean floor from under his feet, sends him far from shore, dangerous and beautiful and unfathomable in all its power.

Whoever he was before, this man is and will always be James Buchanan Barnes.

Now it’s just a matter of reminding _him_.

 

|

 

Bucky talks about carbonara.  He does not talk about loss, or gain, or coming home.

For the first twenty something years of his life, he barely shut up. Had a mouth the size of a ballpark, and wasn’t afraid to use it. And when the war came, he kept talking. Maybe with a little more gravity, a little less naiveté, but he kept talking. Small victory in the face of all the horrors trying to keep him quiet, he figured.

Then there was a long stretch of time when anything he could say ceased to matter. Became a liability. A time that was drenched in red, the stench of blood, the acrid tang of gun-smoke. No room for words when you're dealing death. And anyway, the most efficient killers speak with silence. The golden rule: he learned it well, before he taught it to others.

So now there’s a thousand, million thoughts saved up from those years. But they twist through the caverns of his heart, burrowing deep in his ribs, hiding in the depths of him because he’s not touched them in years and he has no clue where to begin. Pulling out the good means plowing first through the bad, and Bucky is tired. Tired of piecing together a picture, tired of trying to understand who he was and who he is and who he will be. Tired of wondering whether he’s asleep in an assassin’s body, or the other way around.

One of those options means being stuck in a box, stasis and sniper rifles and the emptiness of having his brain made and unmade. The other option, suddenly, means safety. Peace, or some measure of it. This apartment, and the New York City skyline, and these ridiculous pajamas, and the cloudless sky of Steve’s eyes--

A place to rest. At least for awhile. This is a reprieve, Bucky tries to remind himself. Not a guarantee.

He breathes. Lets this moment spin out, suspended, interrupted only by the rasp of paper, the occasional cleared throat, the uncertainty that hangs between two best friends who were boys and then heroes and then enemies and are now back to the start, left to learn each other—and themselves—all over again.

When he does speak, it’s to say "Project rebirth," in a voice rough from disuse. Bucky is as surprised as Steve, who turns to face him with a slightly astonished expression.

"What about it?" he asks, and it's a fair question, because Bucky's never asked him too much about Erskine and the serum. The past belongs in the past, anyway, only...more and more lately, Bucky keeps circling back to the memory of waking up on that HYDRA base, staring up at the face of someone gorgeous and _huge_ looming over him. He remembers that half the shock was from the percussive blasts, and the other half from the knee watering realization that he was in love with a dumb kid who had willingly offered himself up to become a science experiment.

Of course, turning that recollection around in his brain is more than a little depressing. "Love is for children," he had once told Natalia, and at only a few years shy of thirty (or one hundred) Bucky thinks it's truer for him than most. And if not for children, then surely for the living. Bucky's not sure whether he falls into even that category these days; he's alive but is he living?

Still. Everytime he thinks of Steve, warm and undeniable, wide smile and barrel chest, there's a stirring under the cracked glass of Bucky's skin, a feeling like Saturday mornings spent sneaking into a matinee, hot buttered popcorn and cartoons and a double feature in the oppressive summer heat. Back then, Steve's profile used to go gilded in the half-light, lashes absurdly long as he watched the screen. Like now, as he watches Bucky.

This more than anything turns Bucky’s smile fond, makes that stirring coalesce into a flame, burning small but merrily where no one but himself knows. Steve’s damn lashes are the only reason he gets away with most of the stuff he pulls, the only reason people don’t look past the seemingly-naked honesty of his expression to the calculated intent underneath. A mask that isn’t quite a mask, unless you understand what to look for. 

Bucky once sewed up a wound that ran along the side of Steve's face, from hairline to chin, thread between his teeth and needle steady in his hand.

He will always be able to read Steve’s features better than his own.

"Just funny, is all." Bucky absently lays his hand on Steve’s wrist, thumb grazing the translucent branchwork of veins.  "How we both got reborn into something more, in the end."

Steve shoots a look at Bucky, one that holds such blatant disapproval that Bucky knows he’s heard the recrimination in Bucky’s voice, hears the _you got turned into a god_ and _I got turned into a monster_ and hears the despair that comes from knowing you’ve been dead longer than you’ve been alive.

And the thing is. Sure, Steve crashed and Bucky killed, but they’re not trapped in ice or a weapon anymore, they’re alive, they’re alive and Bucky knows that Steve can’t look at that life as anything other than a gift.

For Bucky, it will take a long while yet to recalibrate his mind to view life as anything more than fragile. Easily expended. The pressure points of a human body, the endless vulnerabilities, Bucky knows them all—

"It’s a new world," Steve says, and his voice is soft, edged with the steel of conviction. Bucky shudders as that certainty, that belief, rolls through him. Pulls him out of his thoughts. Makes him hope. Makes him want better. More.

"What matters,” Steve continues, and he is nearer now than he was before, “is what we do, not what we’ve done."

His finger taps a line in the book, lips tipping into a half-smile. "Plus. For all that there’s an awful lot left to experience, there are a few things I never got around to trying even in the forties, you know?"

Without even realizing, Bucky’s lids go half-mast, gravity and the promise in Steve’s voice pulling him in even closer. _Those damn lashes_ , he thinks.

And then Steve’s mouth is slanting over Bucky’s and his tongue is stroking hot and slick against Bucky's own, and there, the taste of him, the clean rush of rain and snow and mint, erases every last remnant of rust still lingering in the back of Bucky’s throat. The smell of him, the feel, the sounds he makes, the way he slides his hand through Bucky's hair and tugs, how he presses near, protector and supplicant at the same time, it’s a Steve that only Bucky knows. Deep down in his marrow, an irrevocable truth.

Coney Island, baseball games, ducking away into the night to avoid a knuckle-rapping from Steve's mom. Laughter. Loyalty. The unwavering way Steve’s gaze has rested on Bucky’s face, in fits and starts from age 6 to 26.

The cycle unwinds. From strangers to enemies to heroes to friends to two boys, side by side, facing a world that’s still so much bigger than them. Together.

Steve rests his forehead against Bucky’s, looks him square in the eyes and says, “Welcome back.”

And Bucky starts to wake up.


End file.
